YOUR AIR AND WATER

The Clean Water Act. The Safe Drinking Water Act. The EPA's authority to set maximum contaminant levels. These laws and the regulations built on them are the reason your tap water doesn't contain lethal concentrations of arsenic, lead, mercury, or industrial chemicals. They are the reason wetlands filter your water before it reaches your well. They are the reason toxic waste ponds have liners.

In 14 months, the Trump administration rolled back, delayed, or killed protections across every one of these systems. PFAS drinking water standards that took decades to establish — rolled back. Clean Water Act jurisdiction over up to 60% of wetlands — stripped. Lead pipe replacement — delayed. Coal ash disposal rules — weakened. The protections are different, but the pattern is the same: the industries that pollute your water lobbied for these rollbacks, and they got them.

In April 2024, the Biden EPA finalized the first-ever national drinking water limits for PFAS compounds — setting maximum contaminant levels of 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied and dangerous forever chemicals. The EPA estimated the standards would prevent thousands of deaths from kidney and testicular cancer and reduce PFAS exposure for approximately 100 million Americans.

The standards had been in development for more than a decade. Scientists had known about the dangers of PFAS since the 1990s, when internal documents from 3M and DuPont revealed the companies had known their chemicals were toxic and suppressed the evidence. Communities near military bases — where firefighting foam containing PFAS had been used for decades — had been drinking contaminated water for years.

The Trump EPA rolled the standards back. The beneficiaries: 3M and Chemours (the DuPont spinoff), which face billions in potential liability for PFAS contamination; water utilities seeking to avoid $1.5 billion per year in compliance costs (despite federal funding being available); and the Department of Defense, one of the nation's largest PFAS contaminator.

Building on the Supreme Court's 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, the Trump administration finalized rules stripping Clean Water Act protections from an estimated up to 60% of the nation's wetlands and millions of miles of streams. These waterways can now be filled, dredged, or polluted without federal permits.

The EPA's own science found that wetlands provide $23.2 billion per year in flood control services alone. They filter sediment, absorb nutrients, trap pollutants, and provide critical habitat for wildlife. Destroying them doesn't just harm the environment — it pushes flood damage onto downstream communities, often low-income neighborhoods and rural towns that can't afford the consequences.

Biden's Lead and Copper Rule Improvements would have required water systems to replace all lead service lines within 10 years — the first mandate for full replacement in decades. The Trump EPA delayed implementation.

Lead pipes are concentrated in older cities and disproportionately affect Black and low-income communities. Studies show that majority-Black neighborhoods are 2-3 times more likely to have lead service lines. The crisis in Flint, Michigan — where lead-contaminated water poisoned an entire city — demonstrated the catastrophic consequences. And yet the lessons are being ignored.

Congress had already appropriated $15 billion specifically for lead pipe replacement through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The money exists. The rule exists. The science is unambiguous. The only thing missing is enforcement.

The Trump EPA weakened Obama-era rules that required utilities to monitor groundwater near ash ponds, close unlined ponds that were contaminating water, and meet structural integrity standards. The 2008 Kingston, Tennessee spill — which released 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash into the Emory River — demonstrated what happens when these rules fail. It was one of the largest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

Communities near coal ash sites are disproportionately low-income and communities of color. The EPA's own risk assessment found that living near unlined coal ash ponds increases cancer risk above acceptable levels. The rule changes benefit coal utilities like Duke Energy and the Southern Company, which face billions in cleanup costs.

The mechanism here is worth naming precisely, because it is not repeal. The 2024 rule is still on the books. What moved were the dates. In July 2025 the EPA pushed groundwater monitoring to August 2029, withdrew that rule in September after adverse comments, then in November proposed giving eleven plants three more years to keep filling unlined ponds larger than 40 acres, past the dates those plants were scheduled to retire. In February 2026 it finalized a rule moving monitoring at legacy sites from May 2028 to February 2031 and cleanup to February 2032, a 33-month delay covering roughly 110 generating units and 189 disposal sites.

In April 2026 the agency proposed going after the standards themselves: dropping cleanup deadlines for more than 100 legacy dumps, and allowing groundwater monitoring wells to sit 150 meters or more from a dump's edge. Lisa Evans of Earthjustice stated the consequence plainly: "The longer industry delays, the more toxic waste enters our water, and the more difficult cleanup becomes." A coal industry coalition defended the rollback on the ground that the EPA's "recent unprecedented expansion of the federal regulations has needlessly diverted funds from the power sector."

Proposed. A rule change would remove the Clean Air Act requirement that data centers publicly disclose their air pollution, making disclosure voluntary at the discretion of state and some local officials. It removes the transparency and public-participation requirements for "minor source" pollution, the category that covers most data centers. Comments closed on August 21, 2026, and by late August the agency was reported to be moving ahead with dropping the public-notice requirement.

Announced. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency will not set nationwide environmental requirements for data centers at all, leaving water use, cooling system design and air quality to individual states and communities.

Announced. Power plants that serve only data centers, and do not connect to the broader grid, were exempted from the pollution limits designed to prevent acid rain.

The objection that survives scrutiny is not "no disclosure." It is about who is left holding the decision. State and local governments competed to attract these facilities with tax incentives and have business agreements with their operators. Handing those same governments discretion over whether the facilities disclose their pollution places the decision with parties that have a financial stake in the answer.